


Cut clean and fancy free

by sistabro



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Amnesia, Angst, Episode: s05e22 Swan Song, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-22
Updated: 2010-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-12 02:43:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistabro/pseuds/sistabro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for this prompt at <a href="http://fleshflutter.livejournal.com">fleshflutter</a>'s <a>Welcome to the Reunion Comment-fic Meme</a>: Dean literally bumps into Sam at the local grocery store but Sam doesn't have any clue as to who Dean is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cut clean and fancy free

Many interpretations of the story overlook the fact that Pandora's Box contained all things evil that would plague mankind and _Hope was inside this box…_   
—Excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Pandora's Box.

::::

He's paying more attention to the shelves than where he's going—he wants to see if he likes pecan pie before the holidays start and he's having a hard time locating the Karo syrup the recipe calls for. So when his cart crashes into someone else's, the apology tumbles from his lips almost automatically, before he even looks to see who he's run into.

He's been grocery shopping on his own for a couple weeks now and this isn't the first time he's run into someone. For once he has a reasonable idea of what he'll see when he looks across first his cart and then theirs. There is no flutter of panic, no nauseatingly familiar sense of free fall. He's actually done this before, more than a few times, enough to have expectations of how this will play out, the proper social forms to follow.

The person across the carts will probably be a woman, because three out of the four times he's done this, it has been a woman. It's even odds that she will have children with her. She will probably be dismissive or annoyed or apologetic, but he doesn't have to figure out which because the required response from him is the same regardless. Apologize and smile, disentangle the carts and move on.

He's done the first part already and by the time he's turned his head, what the nurses dubbed as his most charming smile is firmly in place. It doesn't last though, because what he expects to see isn't what he sees at all, and the shock of it is worse, more disorientating, than trying to wade through the complete lack of context that is his norm.

Across from him is not a woman, but a man. Tall, broad, and devastated.

He doesn't know what to do with that, that intensity, so he starts to retreat, to back up and flee. Pecan pie isn't worth the gnawing anxiety churning in his gut. He probably won't like it anyways.

But when he steps back, the man makes a noise, guttural, primal, pained. He pauses, looks again in spite of himself. Their eyes meet and the man asks in a low, broken voice, "Sammy?"

He recognizes it then, the emotion that twists this man's face. Hope. Bitter, awful, horrible hope. Hope that tears and rends and _hurts_ , but is clung to all the same because without it, there is nothing, absence, void.

He had that hope once. For months the doctors and nurses fed it to him like poison: once the trauma heals, some memories should come back; you call out for people in your sleep, the memories must be there.

Lies, all of it.

He'd heard them, the doctors, in the hallways, after being run through their machines and tests for the third time. There was no trauma, no sign of the lesions that they searched for. He was as much a puzzle to them as he was to himself.

As for when he sleeps, well, from the first day, his dreams have been filled with horrors. He always wakes shaking, crying and afraid. But mercifully the memories of his nightly terrors are as elusive as all the rest. He can never recall any detail, no image, no action, no name. They had recorded him once, to try to jar something lose from the emptiness in his head. He had seen himself scream and twist and rave, but it was like watching someone else, a stranger, and the names he shouted in sleep told him nothing while awake.

Hope strung him up, strung him along for almost a year before he excised it from himself, burnt it, destroyed it and scattered the ashes. Freed himself from the hope for a magical cure, for a single memory older than a year, for the ground to firm beneath his feet, for someone to come and find him, know him, and make him know himself. It had hurt worse than anything, to kill those useless dreams, but it is the only reason he's standing here now, alone, unsupervised, and buying his own groceries. To be hopeless is the only way he knows to move forward, to carve out a life from nothing.

So when the man speaks again, says, "Sammy," like it's a prayer, a plea, he gives no quarter, no compassion.

"My name is John, John Doe, and I don't know you," he says with a shake of his head. Then he backs up a few steps, turns his cart around, and walks away.

He doesn't look back.

::end::

Comments and concrit are, as always, adored.


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